from the total-failure dept

A week ago, we noted that a group of UK Lords were trying to rush through the "Snooper's Charter" that had previously been rejected by the UK. The bill, of course, was about giving the government tremendous levels of access to everyone's electronic data with little oversight. Thankfully, despite having little notice, the attempt caused a flurry of attention and the Lords were forced to back off the plan. It seemed like another good "win" for supporters of privacy and democracy.

Many people still expected the UK government to try again, but few expected it would happen so soon. Yes, less than a week after having the last attempt rejected vocally, the same group of Lords are trying yet again:

On Saturday, ahead of a “report stage” debate on Monday (the Counter-Terrorism and Security Bill is almost fully baked), Lords West, Blair, Carlile and King introduced a new amendment that appears to be almost identical to the last, and to the Communications Data Bill before it.

Again, this new amendment would force “telecommunications operators” – which these days includes the likes of Facebook and Skype, as well as traditional telcos – to store communications metadata for up to a year and hand it over to U.K. authorities when requested. This data retention regime may require the providers to install “specified equipment or systems.”

As David Meyer at GigaOm notes, just as with the last time, this bill lets any "relevant public authority" get access to the data, meaning that such data will be widely accessed and almost certainly widely abused as well. It appears that there are only very minor cosmetic changes between what was proposed and rejected last week and what has been proposed this week. Of course, it won't surprise you to learn the backgrounds of those pushing for this information:

The four peers in question all come from the security establishment — a former Metropolitan Police commissioner (Blair), a former secretary of defense (King), a former minister for security and counter-terrorism (West), and a former government anti-terror adviser (Carlile).

Meyer also quotes Lord King saying that he doesn't know about or understand the various new social media services like WhatsApp and SnapChat, "but what is absolutely clear is that the terrorists and jihadists do" -- which is why he thinks the Snooper's Charter is needed. In other words, he admits his own ignorance, but doesn't seem to care, because he is ruled by irrational fear. That does not seem like a particularly intelligent way to govern or to legislate.

from the democracy,-who-needs-it? dept

Techdirt has been following the fascinating experiment of allowing the public to crowdsource proposals for new laws in Finland. As we reported, the Citizen's Initiative Act requires the Finnish Parliament to process any bill that collects 50,000 signatures from citizens of voting age. Last year, a bill to make copyright more balanced and better suited to the digital age managed to gather the requisite number of signatures, offering hope that it would be presented to the Finnish Parliament for a vote. But as TorrentFreak explained more recently, the Finnish Parliament's Education and Culture Committee recommended that the "Common Sense For Copyright" bill should be rejected. TorrentFreak quotes the digital rights group EDRi's explanation of what happened:

"In its report, the Committee notes that the initiative suggests several ambitious amendments, but that it considers it impossible to propose, based on the initiative, even partial changes to the existing copyright law," EDRi notes.

"The report states that the initiative includes internal contradictions and that many of the amendments it suggests are too significantly incompatible with the current legislation."

That's rather telling, because the measures in "Common Sense For Copyright" are hardly radical:

The draft, the brainchild of the Open Ministry nonprofit, calls for reduced penalties for copyright infringement and current penalties to be applied only in cases of a commercial scale. Fair Use provisions would also be expanded, alongside exemptions for those wishing to backup purchased media and time-shift commercial content.

The fact that the Parliamentary committee thought that even these mild measures were "too significantly incompatible with the current legislation" underlines just how great the gulf is between actual copyright law and what many people feel would be fair. Sadly, a report on the Finnish public broadcasting company YLE's website confirms that not only did the Finnish Parliament refuse to consider the bill, it has dismissed out of hand every crowdsourced bill that reached the 50,000 threshold:

Each of the six citizen's initiatives that have proceeded through the proper channels to reach the parliamentary floor for discussion has failed. The Finnish Parliament says it doesn't have the time to hear them and they can’t be moved to another date. Activists say technical shortcomings are poor justification for the slowness of the process.

That's a truly disappointing end to a story that began on a hopeful note. When politicians won't even allow the public these tiny expressions of democracy -- just as the European Commission refused to allow a purely symbolic online petition against TAFTA/TTIP to go ahead -- is it any wonder that people feel disenfranchised and disenchanted with politics these days, or that they are starting to take to the streets as a result?

from the sharing-is-caring dept

As anyone who reads my posts can probably tell, I really love politics. I like talking about issues, I like playing polemicist with politicians, and I really, really like voting. There's a sense of pride in voting, where even if I ultimately know my contribution to the running of our society is a small one, I'm still engaged in it. I'm not alone, either. Lots of people like to share the fact that they voted and what they voted for. That kind of pride is a good thing, I think.

While the fear over voting-booth selfies during Thursday's Local and European Elections was mostly exaggerated, there is a real danger lurking inside polling stations for British voters: Sharing photos of completed ballots—something many appear keen to do—is against U.K. law. The Register reports that under various parts of Section 66 of the Representation of the People Act 1983, it is an offence to make public someone's vote after a mark has been made on the paper. Many citizens don't appear to have realised this and have proudly been indicating who they have voted for on Twitter.

Now, my understanding for the reasons of this law is that the government is attempting to minimize any chance of voter intimidation or influencing the votes of others through this ballot sharing. The general idea is that if everyone keeps their voting ballot a secret, the larger public's vote will be more impartial. Here is my nuanced and well-reasoned response to the theory and the accompanying law: "Hahahahahahahahaha!"

The entire notion that keeping pictures and social media out of the vote-sharing game will accomplish anything at all is inherently silly. The culture of politics today is so completely open for discussion that there is an entire industry built around it: the political theater on talk-radio and the twenty-four hour news channels. Any pretense about getting citizens to not talk about who and what they voted for is so naive that it's a wonder the entire notion hasn't been laughed off of the British Islands by now. And, as we've covered before, it isn't just that side of the ocean, either. Right here at home, in Wisconsin, citizens can also face fines and jail time for sharing their completed ballots on social media.

The point is that now that the culture of sharing has grown such that this many people are violating this law, the entire purpose of the law is logically obviated. After all, if huge numbers of people are sharing their ballots, the intimidation factor kind of goes away. It's just a matter of pride from involved citizens. Criminalizing that pride doesn't make any sense.

from the at-most dept

As people have begun to learn about corporate sovereignty through plans to include it in TAFTA/TTIP, the European Commission has been trying to scotch the idea that it might allow corporations to dictate policies to nations. Here, for example, is a comment in the Commission's main TTIP FAQ, which tries to answer the question "Why is the EU including Investor to State Dispute Settlement in the TTIP?":

Including measures to protect investors does not prevent governments from passing laws, nor does it lead to laws being repealed. At most, it can lead to compensation being paid.

Those are all true statements in theory, but that's probably not much comfort to Romania, which has been discovering the harsh reality in the long-running discussions over whether to allow a Canadian company to create a huge open-cast gold and silver mine in the country. Here's what happened last year:

Gabriel Resources Ltd. (GBU), backed by billionaire hedge-fund manager John Paulson, threatened to seek as much as $4 billion of damages should Romanian lawmakers vote to oppose its gold mine project in the country.

"We have a very, very robust case, and we believe we have claims up to $4 billion that we can send to the Romanian state," Gabriel Resources Chief Executive Officer Jonathan Henry said today in a telephone interview. "We will go ahead and do that if the vote is against."

As the European Commission notes, the existence of a bilateral investment treaty with Canada that includes a dispute settlement mechanism did not, in itself, stop the Romanian politicians from blocking the gold mine project in the parliamentary vote, which took place in December 2013. So everything's fine, right? Democracy prevailed, and the people were heard. After all, "at most", as the FAQ helpfully reminds us, Romania will have to pay $4 billion damages at some point.

Except that, for a country with a GDP of less than $200 billion in 2013, this represents 2% of the country's entire economic production. That seems an incredibly high price to pay for the exercise of basic democracy. The danger is that faced with the threat of such enormous fines, other parliaments will lack the courage shown by Romanian's politicians, and choose to ignore the will of their people by meekly acquiescing to corporate demands.

Does GBU deserve some compensation if a project is cancelled by the local government because of widespread public concerns about its safety? Perhaps -- although business always involves some risk, and foreign investment is no different. If a company is really worried about that aspect, it can take out insurance -- from the World Bank, for example. Does GBU deserve to be awarded 2% of a country's GDP, paid for by the citizens of a land struggling to raise its living standards? That hardly seems fair. And yet it's precisely what ISDS could allow, because the arbitration panel that decides such corporate sovereignty cases is unconstrained in what it can award, and not at all concerned with what the knock-on effects might be.

But the politicians making up the European Commission should be, since they are supposed to represent the 500 million European citizens that pay their salaries. The fact that they are pushing as hard as they can for ISDS in TAFTA/TTIP shows which side they are really on, and that they are quite happy to put corporations before nations, and profits before people.

from the yo-dawg-i-herd-you-like-petition-responses... dept

Respond to all Whitehouse.gov petitions that get over 100k signatures within one month.

Whitehouse.gov petitions were intended to give the public a voice. The idea is that if more than 100,000 people all feel strongly enough about something to hand over their home address and personal email to the government and complete a nearly impossible CAPTCHA, then the President of the United States should have to respond to them. Because... democracy.

Here's the problem: there are dozens of Whitehouse.gov petitions that have received more than 100k signatures, but have gone months and even years without a response (1). That's not improving transparency, it's the same gov't spin we've always had. So what will it, Obama, hypocrisy or democracy? Sign!

It's a nice idea. There are petitions that appear to be permanently stuck to the administration's backburner while others that haven't even met the 100k signature threshold have been answered simply because the White House has a canned response on hand.

Others require more thoughtful answers or (would) force the administration to take a stance on controversial issues, something it clearly would rather not do. The average wait for a response has slipped to nearly 300 days. Among the petitions still being actively ignored by the White House are ones dealing with pardoning Edward Snowden and firing the attorney who handled Aaron Swartz's prosecution.

This new petition, created on April 1st, is clearly tongue-in-cheek. While there are some petitioners who mistake petitions for binding contracts, this probably isn't one of them. However, it does go meta on the issue, potentially putting the administration in the position of agreeing to address petitions in a timely fashion. This could prove uncomfortable for the White House since it appears it would rather ignore certain petitions until the White House changes hands in 2016.

from the how-might-it-work dept

True democracy is not just about casting a vote every five years. It means citizens being fully involved in the proposal, development and creation of laws. The Commission on Digital Democracy currently being established will consider what part technology can play in helping people to take an active part in the way the country is run.

The commission is setting its sights on "Parliament 2.0", a vision of the future in which citizens participate in online elections, electronic referendums and richer relationships with their political representatives.

In recent years, we've seen technology help people become more involved in debate about all aspects of society. So it is clear that it can play a much greater role in political participation too. As the Commission gets started, it's a good time to think about what we want our digital democracy to look like. There is inspiration to be found all over the web.

Wikipolitics

Technology can enable direct participation in the democratic process, without relying on representatives and without the citizen even needing to leave the comfort of their home.

One particularly useful tool in the quest for a digitally engaged electorate will be online forums. These can be built to manage discussions about proposed legislation in a structured way, making it easy for citizens to participate meaningfully.

Politicians and policymakers can use online forums to crowd-source expertise and the views of citizens on their plans – and to refine their proposals based on what they get back. This "direct democracy" would allow for laws to be based on genuine citizen deliberation rather than merely aggregating the preferences of citizens into a single vote at the beginning of each electoral cycle.

Wikipedia is an example of how this system might work, but it also shows some of the problems that can arise when technology and democracy mix.

Wikipedia has relatively little mechanism for coordinating edits, instead allowing editors to work on their own. Despite this decentralized approach, the quality of articles is generally very high. On the down side, edit wars and sock puppetry – when individuals use multiple user identities to create the impression that their views are shared by others – are an enduring concern.

To help make Wikipedia a trustworthy source, editors can build their reputation by establishing a track record of constructive behavior. Wikipedia has a hierarchy of users for administrative purposes, based on community approval, but all users are considered to have equally valid opinions regarding Wikipedia content. The emphasis is on building consensus; an arbitration committee deals with disputes that remain unresolved.

Reddit, rate it, vote it

More formal mechanisms are to be found elsewhere online that could help provide the kind of format and structure that might be needed to produce good legislation. In Yahoo! Answers, for example, readers can vote up and vote down contributions made by others. Writers who are voted up gain points that indicate their good reputation.
Other question-and-answer forums, such as Reddit and Stack Overflow, use similar mechanisms. This kind of collaboration can be further improved using the kind of real-time, simultaneous editing provided by Google docs.

But again, there are perils. Time wasters, product pushers and disruptive trolls are bad news in online forums and can disrupt the way they operate. In the context of digital democracy, the potential for damage is even higher.

We will need to develop mechanisms that would make it possible for everyone to get involved in Parliament 2.0 in a fair and transparent way. This includes preventing abuse by lobbyists, special-interest groups, and extremists, who may try to thwart the mechanisms for non-democratic purposes. Unlike in traditional voting, which provides each person with one vote, we can't assume that everyone will participate in digital democracy equally. That makes it quite difficult to define fairness. It is also difficult to balance accountability (needed to prevent trolling) and privacy (needed to allow free expression).

Online voting

Computer scientists have made great progress in figuring out how online elections could be made secure. One important idea is to design systems that enable outcome verifiability. This would allow citizens to check that the outcome of an election really does match the votes cast.

To ensure free and fair elections, we also need a property called incoercibility. This means voters cannot sell their vote, or be forced to vote in a particular way. Online voting systems with these features are being developed by researchers around the world and this will soon change the way we participate in elections.

The hope is that, if well-designed and implemented, mechanisms for digital democracy could be built that would greatly increase societal inclusiveness and cohesion, as well as lowering the costs of making democracy work.

Mark Ryan is a Professor of Computer Security at University of Birmingham. Gurchetan Grewal is a PhD student in Computer Security at the University of Birmingham. Both receive funding from EPSRC for computer security research, including the security of online voting mechanisms. Grewal works on the project "Trustworthy voting systems" funded by EPSRC.

from the democracy-in-action! dept

While TPP negotiators had hoped to finish off the negotiations in Singapore over the past few days, it appears that did not happen, though they claim to have made substantial progress and will meet again next month. From the reports of people there, the negotiators made sure that public interest groups were excluded from even the press briefing about the negotiations, which should tell you all you need to know about what the negotiators think of the public. But, in case you weren't sure, the USTR, Michael Froman, has finally explained why the TPP negotiating positions must be kept secret. Apparently, all of us in the public, are too fucking stupid to understand the important work that he's doing, and we might "misunderstand" it. Therefore, we peons must be kept in the dark, while important people like himself negotiate on our behalf. According to Jamie Love:

Froman said if the text was public, people would misunderstand "negotiating positions."

In other words, the USTR is not a fan of democracy.

If you think the public is too stupid to understand the public policy positions you're negotiating for, then you shouldn't be in that job.

from the oh-really? dept

Paul Rosenzweig, the former Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy at Homeland Security, was supposed to testify for the House Intelligence Committee about NSA surveillance. The hearing was postponed and Rosenzweig can't make the new date, but he's posted the testimony he intended to give, in which he makes this incredible claim:

Transparency is good. Too much transparency defeats the very purpose of democracy.

The details of this claim are, obviously, a lot more nuanced, but it seems like it's built on a false premise: that people are seeking absolute and complete transparency in everything that the government does. While that may be true in some cases, it's a very extreme minority. Most people are merely arguing that there are specific things that the government does in our name, which (often by law or Constitution) require significantly more transparency. But, Rosenzweig sets up this strawman to suggest that those arguing for greater transparency don't recognize that there can be any secrecy.

Madison understood that transparency was not a supreme value that trumped all other concerns. He also participated in the U.S. Constitutional Convention of 1787, the secrecy of whose proceedings was the key to its success. While governments may hide behind closed doors, U.S. democracy was also born behind them.

Right, but at the end of that process, it was made very, very public. Not so with NSA surveillance. So this is a total red herring. Imagine if the US Constitution were not just written in secret, but then kept that way? Furthermore, in retrospect, it's difficult to see why it even made sense for the Constitutional Convention to have been secret in the first place. There's really no reason why the negotiations and debates couldn't have been done publicly.

In the new domain of dataveillance, the form of oversight should vary depending upon the extent to which transparency and opacity are necessary to the new powers authorized. Allowing some form of surveillance is vital to assure the protection of American interests. Conversely, allowing full public disclosure of our sources and methods is dangerous – identifying publicly how we conduct surveillance risks use of that information by terrorists and, in turn, draws a roadmap of which threats are not known. Thus, complete transparency will defeat the very purpose of disclosure and may even make us less secure.

This is the only place where Rosenzweig seems to come close to actually defending his initial statement that "too much transparency defeats the very purpose of democracy," and it's a very, very weak sell. If his initial premise is true, then he appears to be arguing that "the purpose of democracy" is to "protect us from terrorists." That's not true. It's a fundamental error in his analysis. In fact, it can be very strongly argued that the opposite is true: we've long agreed that trading lives for freedom is part of the American Way. Patrick Henry argued "give me liberty or give me death." He didn't argue that we needed to give up liberties to protect him from death.

Furthermore, it's patently and obviously false that public disclosure of how surveillance is conducted makes those surveillance methods useless. For decades it has been public knowledge that law enforcement can wiretap phone lines. And yet it remains a useful surveillance tool. Yes, some terrorists will figure out ways around it, but (as many people noted), most terrorists were already well aware that any electronic communication could and would be tracked, and they were careful to use other means when possible. Furthermore, the goal of a free society should not be to stop terrorists from any possible way of communicating in secret, but to recognize that this is going to happen no matter what, and to focus on alternative means of policing, intelligence and law enforcement to do our best to protect against it.

In the end, I have to think that Patrick Henry's rallying cry of "give me liberty or give me death" is a hell of a lot more American that Rosenzweig's surveillance state apologism of "too much transparency undermines democracy." We should be living in a country that stands behind the first statement and rejects, wholeheartedly, the cowardice and shamefulness of the latter.

It's led us to a point in our relationship with the government, where we have an executive -- a Department of Justice -- that's unwilling to prosecute high officials who lied to Congress and the country on camera, but they'll stop at nothing to persecute someone who told them the truth. And that's a fundamentally dangerous thing to democracy.

That encapsulates so much of what the problem is with everything that's happened in the past few months. It's a point well worth repeating. The other video I really liked was the one where Snowden talked about the problem of secret laws and secret programs and the idea that the government is supposed to be in power with the consent of the governed, but how that's impossible without oversight.

The key statement:

This is not about any particular program. This is about a trend in the relationship between the governing and the governed in Amercia, that is coming increasingly into conflict with what we expect as a free and democratic society. If we can't understand the policies and programs of our government, we cannot grant our consent in regulating them....

Snowden has mostly stayed hidden away from the public eye since all of this began. He's turned down basically all interview requests, so there's been very little shown of him actually speaking, other than the initial video he recorded with Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald. Once again, these videos show someone who appears to have thought deeply about what he is doing and why he did it.

from the mission-creep dept

In the wake of the continuing leaks about the NSA's activities, most commentators are understandably still trying to get to grips with the enormity of what has been happening. But John Naughton, professor of the public understanding of technology at the UK's Open University, tackles a very different question on his blog: what is likely to happen in the future, if things carry on as they are?

Naughton notes that the NSA's mission statement includes the following phrase: "to gain a decision advantage for the Nation and our allies under all circumstances." "Under all circumstances" means that as the Internet grows -- and as we know, it is currently growing rapidly -- so the NSA will naturally ask for resources to allow it to do tomorrow what it is doing today: monitoring more or less everything that happens online. Naughton then asks where that might lead if the political climate in the US remains sufficiently favorable to the NSA that it does, indeed, get those resources:

The obvious conclusion therefore, is that unless some constraints on its growth materialise, the NSA will continue to expand. It currently has 35,000 employees. How many will it have in ten years' time? Who can say: 50,000, maybe? Maybe even more? So we're confronted with the likelihood of the growth of a bureaucratic monster.

How will such a body be subjected to democratic oversight and control? Let me rephrase that: can such a monster be subjected to democratic control?

Although optimists might answer 'yes', Naughton points to the FBI as an example of what has already happened in this area:

those with long memories recall the fear and loathing that J. Edgar Hoover, the founder -- and long-term (48 years) Director -- of the FBI aroused in important segments of the American polity. The relatively restrained Wikipedia entry for him claims that even US presidents feared him and quotes Harry Truman as saying that "Hoover transformed the FBI into his private secret police force". "We want no Gestapo or secret police", Truman is reported as saying. "FBI is tending in that direction. They are dabbling in sex-life scandals and plain blackmail. J. Edgar Hoover would give his right eye to take over, and all congressmen and senators are afraid of him."

He then goes on to draw the obvious parallel with a possible tomorrow:

Now spool forward a decade or so and imagine a Director of the NSA, a charismatic 'securocrat' imbued with a mission to protect the United States from terrorists and whatever other threats happen to be current at the time. He (or she) has 50,000+ operatives who have access to every email, clickstream log, text message, phone call and social-networking post that every legislator has ever made. S/he is a keystroke away from summoning up cellphone location logs showing every trip a lawmaker has made, from teenager-hood onwards, every credit- and debit-card payment. Everything.

And then tell me that lawmakers will not be as scared of that person as their predecessors were of Hoover.